Less Than Human

by Maxine McArthur

  “This is at one-eighth speed,” said McGuire, loudly to be heard over the rumble of the engine.

  Sweat dripped off Mikuni’s forehead.

  “Normally, it wouldn’t use a continuous series of movements. It waits until a piece is placed on the table and the signal is sent to perform the next task.”

  The table on Ishihara’s left ground around 180 degrees and fixed itself with a thunk directly in front of him.

  “I’m skipping the next part because it doesn’t move around.”

  The robot arm swept up to rest for thirty seconds before swinging back to its original position. At no time had the arm come near Ishihara’s head or the upper half of his body, and he was a lot taller than Nakamura.

  “Thank you, Assistant Inspector. That’s the entire sequence.” McGuire turned the robot off and faced them. “You see? It couldn’t have hit Nakamura, even if he disabled the safeties for some reason. Which he wouldn’t. And if something happened in the middle of its routine, I wouldn’t have been able to start it up and put it smoothly through the program.”

  Ishihara stepped away from the work cell.

  “So what are you saying?” Ishihara pulled his cigarettes from his pocket, then twisted the empty packet with a scowl.

  “He was either assaulted here by someone and left to be found. Or he must have been hit somewhere else and brought here.”

  “But it’s Nakamura’s blood on the end there all right,” said Mikuni. “And Forensics confirmed the wound fits the machine.”

  McGuire tapped at the controls again, then walked around to the front of the robot. She reached up, grasped the bloody end-part with her gloved left hand and unclipped some leads with her right. Two good twists, and she held the welding tool as a separate piece of machinery. Ishihara could see her wrist droop, and when he took it from her it was so heavy he could barely hold it in one hand himself.

  “Will that do as a weapon?” she said.

  Ishihara put the chunk of steel on the table. “We’ll need to print this,” he said to Mikuni. “Who could get in?”

  Mikuni shook his head, his eyes on the robot hand. “It’s a card-key entry. Only employees, and only those with permission can get their cards enabled after hours. The day shift finishes at six, and the factories are clear by half past. Senior duty staff and security services make sure the rooms are clear before locking up.”

  “There’s no night shift?”

  “Not people. The robots keep working all night. There’s one person on duty in the central monitoring station of each factory.”

  The fingerprints and other residues would have to be checked against those of people with access authority and, possibly, with the rest of the company. Shit of a job, and sometimes the results took so long it was easier to try and break a suspect’s alibi. Especially as organic residues weren’t admissible as sole evidence.

  “Nobody came in the front?”

  Mikuni shook his head. “Only McGuire-san.” He turned to McGuire. “Who would know how to do this?”

  “Someone with a basic grasp of industrial robot maintenance who has access to the controller.”

  Ishihara raised an eyebrow. Half the company had a basic grasp of industrial robot maintenance.

  McGuire saw his expression and shrugged crossly. “I don’t know. This lab’s supposed to be top secret.”

  “So you don’t think it was someone from outside the company?” Mikuni seemed to be thinking aloud, and Ishihara enjoyed seeing McGuire look down her long gaijin nose at him.

  “I don’t think that’s likely. How would they know about the robot, and how could they get in?”

  “Nakamura might have let them in,” said Mikuni.

  There were no names on the visitor’s list last night, not even McGuire’s. If Nakamura forgot to list her, he might have forgotten to list someone else. Or the murderer might have entered through the downstairs toilet window, and Nakamura let them into the lab. And watched while they disconnected a weapon? Ishihara frowned. Unless Nakamura had already disconnected the hand and the murderer picked it up because it was the handiest weapon.

  “Whatsisname … the director of research, Yui, said he heard Nakamura has gambling debts in town.”

  In other words, it might be a gang killing. But someone from the gangs would carry his own weapon. And Nakamura surely wouldn’t have stood placidly by while some gangster wandered around the lab and hefted heavy objects. He’d raise the alarm. Or try to leave. Or at least try to defend himself. And a gangster wouldn’t know how to set up the death to make it look like an accident.

  “If you don’t need me anymore, I should get back to Osaka,” said McGuire. She peeled off the gloves and dropped them on the table. “When you start up that computer again, I’d appreciate it if you could pass on to me any information about this welder or about Kawanishi Metal works that you find. It might help me determine what happened there.”

  Mikuni gave Ishihara a look that meant trouble. “We looked in that computer. There’s nothing in it.”

  McGuire raised her eyebrows. “But that’s the workstation Nakamura would have been using.”

  Mikuni rubbed his forehead tiredly. “Someone’s wiped it, then.”

  “That’s all right. Nakamura always made backup files,” said McGuire.

  “What do you mean by backup files?” Mikuni gave Ishihara another troubled glance.

  “Computer files saved on discs, paper files, files saved on another hard drive—probably one of the networked computers in this room.” McGuire explained as if to a child.

  “These discs and things would be in his desk?” said Mikuni.

  McGuire looked at him, her brows drawing her face together in one of those exaggerated foreign expressions. “You mean you haven’t found any backups?”

  Mikuni cleared his throat. “Not as such. We might have overlooked some.”

  “I hope so,” said McGuire. “Because if you can’t find any backups, that means whoever killed Nakamura took them. And the reason he was killed is probably in those files.”

  “How can you be sure…?” Mikuni began, but Ishihara interrupted.

  “We need to talk. McGuire-san, I’ll give you a lift back to Osaka. Would you mind waiting in the lobby?”

  She looked at him doubtfully. “I can take the fast train.”

  “It’s easier by car,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said stiffly. She nodded at Mikuni.

  “Thank you for your help,” Mikuni said hurriedly. “The constable will see you to the lobby.”

  She left.

  “Maybe Nakamura just forgot to make backups today,” said Mikuni. He took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. “I can’t build a case around that.”

  “No, but you can take it as another suspicious circumstance,” said Ishihara. “McGuire worked with Nakamura for several years. She must know something about him.”

  “We’ll check with his coworkers here,” said Mikuni grudgingly.

  Ishihara left it at that. “Can you check whose card was used on the door?”

  Mikuni nodded. “We did that. Only Nakamura’s card was used last night in the lab. Once at 7:00, then again at 7:50, then again at 8:05.”

  “Was Nakamura’s card still on him?”

  Mikuni shook his head. “No. He must have let the murderer in. The murderer took the card when he left. We’re searching for it now.”

  “It’s a damn small thing to search for.”

  Mikuni nodded glumly.

  Ishihara straightened up and glanced at the time: 3:45. He’d better get McGuire back to Osaka.

  “Good luck. Call me if I can help.”

  Mikuni raised his hand. “Thanks for coming down.”

  When Ishihara reached the lobby, a tall man in a striped suit with pointy lapels was talking to McGuire.

  She turned to Ishihara, relief on her face. “This is Director Yui,” she said. “He’s the head of research here.”

  “Developmental resea
rch,” corrected the man. He eyeballed Ishihara from behind thick-rimmed glasses, the latest fashion.

  He must be in his early fifties to be in that job, but his tanned, smooth skin didn’t show it. Rejuv therapy, maybe. Ishihara summed him up as educated and still smart. And obviously trying to pump McGuire.

  “S’ a pleasure,” Ishihara grunted. “You’re in charge of the lab, then?”

  “In a sense, yes.” Yui smirked at McGuire as though referring to a shared secret.

  McGuire managed a small, expressionless smile.

  “I am ultimately responsible for the research and personnel here, yes,” Yui went on. “But I don’t interfere in the, er, housekeeping, so to speak.”

  Yeah, yeah, we know you’re too senior for all that. Ishihara sighed mentally.

  “So you knew the corpse well?”

  McGuire winced at the flat, unadorned phrase, but Yui ignored it.

  “Young Nakamura was with us for, let’s see, nearly four years. I didn’t know him socially.” Yui managed to imply the impropriety of such an idea. “But I took an interest in his work, naturally. And it concerned me if he wasn’t happy at the company.”

  “In what way wasn’t he happy?”

  “I said, ‘if,’ Inspector. As far as I know, young Nakamura liked his job. Such a sad accident,” he added belatedly.

  “You didn’t notice anything unusual about his behavior recently?” Ishihara didn’t expect much of an answer.

  “What are you implying, Inspector?” Yui drew himself straighter.

  Ishihara sighed again. Nobody ever just answered the questions. “Nothing. I’m trying to find out what happened.”

  “Actually…” Yui paused.

  McGuire watched him warily.

  Ishihara waited a moment before prompting. He felt Yui was waiting for the prompt. “What?”

  “Nakamura did seem a little preoccupied these past months. His work wasn’t as thorough as usual.”

  McGuire made an ungenteel sound like a snort. “What was Nakamura working on? When he contacted me, he said he had some information about a welder from a factory in Osaka where there’d been an accident.”

  “I’m sure he was just being cautious,” said Yui smoothly. “He was a cautious young man.”

  “Why was he preoccupied, do you think?” said Ishihara.

  “I don’t know.” Yui spread one hand in denial. “But someone mentioned they’d seen him betting at an establishment in the town.”

  “Betting, huh?” Ishihara pretended to think aloud.

  “It doesn’t sound like him,” said McGuire shortly. She met Ishihara’s eye, then looked obviously at the door.

  “He must have made cautious bets,” said Ishihara. “You’ve been overseas this week, Director?”

  “A short trip to Shanghai, Inspector. Zecom has a factory there.”

  “It’s good of you to come in at this hour. You must be jetlagged.”

  McGuire sighed and looked at the door again.

  “I went home earlier,” said Yui. “At about eight o’clock.”

  “Ah,” said Ishihara. “Nice meeting you.” He wished Inspector Mikuni luck with Yui. The man would be a bastard to interview.

  Yui inclined his head in farewell, a little less than politeness demanded.

  Out in the corridor, McGuire’s shoulders drooped and her feet dragged.

  “What did he want to talk about?” said Ishihara.

  She concentrated with obvious effort. “He said he’s upset about Nakamura, offered to call me a car back to Osaka. He didn’t say so outright, but m…mainly he wanted to know why Nakamura invited me out here tonight.”

  “Why did Nakamura call you?”

  “I told you, he said he had information about the Kawanishi welder.”

  “What information?”

  “I don’t know.” She pronounced each syllable carefully. “He didn’t have a chance to tell me.”

  Ishihara fished in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes, remembered the packet was empty. “I wonder why Yui was so concerned about that?”

  “He’s probably worried Nakamura was spilling info about their latest wonder robot, whatever it is,” she said.

  “Industrial espionage?” Ishihara considered the idea. As motivation for murder, he found it pretty thin, but he was aware that company men took this kind of thing seriously. “Was Nakamura’s research important enough to make that a possibility?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Maybe he fell victim to professional jealousy?”

  She half smiled. “If anything, he’d be jealous of others. But in a place like this, the content of research isn’t the only cause for bad feeling. People get upset because someone takes a sunnier desk, or gets a newer computer, or takes an unscheduled half day of leave.”

  “Was he difficult? Made enemies easily?”

  “He m…may have changed after he came here.” Her eyes met Ishihara’s, then slipped away.

  He wondered if she stammered in English, too. It upset her, he could see her wince each time she did it.

  “I thought foreigners got to the point,” he said. “Why worry about being fair? The man’s dead, it can’t hurt him.”

  Her face went a little paler, if that were possible. When she spoke, he realized it was from anger.

  “When he worked with us, he was devious, small-minded, and prying,” she said tightly. “He had all sorts of annoying habits.”

  “Like?”

  “Like he used to clock in early and go home early, but all he ever did for the first hour of the day was read the newspaper.”

  She ticked them off on strong, knobby-jointed fingers. “He always claimed more than his fair share of credit in a project, he criticized m…members of his team in front of senior staff, he argued with decisions that had been reached by fair process, and he used to lurk around the junior female locker room on Friday afternoons. That last is hearsay,” she added reluctantly.

  “Sounds charming. What kind of worker was he?”

  She thought for a moment. “He would never explore an option that was unlikely or unorthodox,” she said finally. “He never seemed to trust his intuition.”

  “Methodical, you mean?”

  “Yes, he was good at setting up experiments once someone else had decided the parameters.”

  This cautious, methodical bloke would have hidden his backups in predictable places. If you knew his habits, that is. And as McGuire said, the murderer probably did.

  “Why do you ask?” she interrupted his train of thought.

  “I was wondering if he would have done something like hide the files in full view.”

  “The purloined letter method?” She used an English phrase but he thought he understood.

  “Yeah, somewhere so obvious we looked right past it.”

  “Like sending e-mail to himself? Whoever killed him probably saw it first,” she said gloomily. “Don’t forget to check his extra locker.”

  He stared at her.

  “Once when we were out drinking Nakamura told me that he always kept an extra locker in one of the other change rooms, possibly the women’s,” she explained. “Under another name. He swore me to secrecy.”

  Ishihara stared incredulously at her, and she shrugged crossly. “He said he felt safer.”

  “Safer, right. I’ll pass it on,” he said.

  “And he m…might have rented a storage facility somewhere else,” she added. “You know, one of those you can open with a password.”

  Ishihara groaned inwardly at the thought of the tens of thousands of rental lockers, rooms, and cupboards scattered throughout the Greater Osaka area. Even with increased apartment space in the Bettas, people seemed to need places to put things.

  They left the building and walked to Ishihara’s car, parked in the guest parking lot in front of the main lobby. The sky glowed blue-cream on the eastern horizon, although it was still too dark to see the time on his phone. The fluorescent dial in the car said 4:20. By the time they
got back to Osaka it would be six-ish.

  “You’d better drop me at Tomita,” said McGuire faintly as they got in. The angles of her face looked sharper.

  “You sure you want to go back to work?” he said, as they drove out the Zecom security gates and past the windowless first-floor walls of the Zecom Betta, built like a fortress.

  “I’m sure. I’ve got am…major demonstration today.” She untwisted the seat belt and rebuckled it. Her movements were jerky and uncoordinated. “If it’s inconvenient, put me down at the fast train station.”

  “You should go home. Tell me, McGuire-san, you ever heard of karoshi?”

  “Death from overwork?” She focused on the dashboard. “You think Nakamura might have stayed one night too many and got careless? He never showed that much enthusiasm when he worked for us.”

  Ishihara tapped his fingers on the wheel, half-frustrated, half-amused. “I wasn’t talking about Nakamura.”

  He drove up the ramp to the freeway entrance, only to find it blocked by several large trucks.

  McGuire groaned. “I should have taken the train.”

  The car advanced a couple of meters. Didn’t look promising. The auto navigator blipped a belated warning across its screen. Use alternate route. Ishihara unhooked the two-way radio below the dashboard and called Traffic Control.

  “There’s an accident being cleared away near Himeji,” he passed on to McGuire, who hadn’t followed the radio conversation. “It’ll be an hour or so before the traffic starts flowing properly.”

  He rummaged under his seat, then in the door pocket, and with a grunt of satisfaction found a half-full packet of cigarettes. He opened the window and lit one.

  When he looked over at McGuire again, she was asleep, her head tilted precariously on the seat belt sash. He looked out his own window, embarrassed to stare. Below the freeway and fast train overpass, the Zecom Betta spread in a protective square fence around the factory. Only a few lights flickered from its many windows. Too early for most people to rise.

  Beyond the Betta he could see glimpses of fields against the dark backdrop of the mountains. Two or three lights gleamed faintly out there like stars through smog. He supposed many of the local families had moved into the Betta, too. As the old people disappear, so do the customs and beliefs that hold families to places. Like himself, with no hometown to return to. What was he going to do with retirement? Buy a tiny flat in some country town that accepted the old people unwanted by the cities?